Eighteen Years Waiting
by Becca SnilyFreak Lexter
Summary: "Eighteen years, and I'd somehow managed to live without her, my only hope being that she was still alive and that she was still out there, somewhere, waiting for me just as I had been waiting for her."   A one-shot about the Queen meeting her daughter.


Eighteen years and a day had passed since I'd last seen my child. Eighteen years and a day since I held her in my arms, since I felt her soft baby skin beneath my cool hands. Eighteen years and a day since I'd laid eyes on my little pride and joy, my baby girl, the one who made my life worth living through even the most trying of times.

For eighteen years I had longed to hold her again, to run my fingers through her unnaturally long golden-blonde hair, to hear her little baby laugh in my ears as I pressed her against me. And for eighteen years I had missed her, and loved her, more than I ever thought possible.

Nevertheless, things seemed to be very near normal again when it happened. I was sitting in my armchair, a book propped open upon my lap, and though my eyes were reading quickly, darting across the pages as if they were chasing those ever-elusive thieves and thugs, my mind and my heart were both somewhere else. I was barely taking in a single word as I turned a page, but suddenly my husband, who had been sitting on our bed deep in thought, stood up and crossed the room. For a moment I watched him press his fingers lightly against the window beside me, watched his eyebrows arch and his lips curl downwards to form a somewhat bemused expression on his face, but my curiosity, rare as it was, got the better of me.

"Something wrong?" I asked him gently. "Is someone there?"

"Hmm?" He turned his head to look at me as he took his hand away. "Oh, no, it's… hmm." He took a small step back from the window, but continued to stare out it, hands crossed firmly behind his back, the same bemused expression covering his face.

On any other day, perhaps I would've joined him at the window; perhaps I would've seen what he had seen. Perhaps I would've pressed him further, and perhaps he would've told me everything that was on his mind. But instead, I closed my eyes and saw his face close to mine, looking down on me with those same sad eyes that I had fallen in love with twenty years ago; I saw a single teardrop drip down his weathered cheek, and I saw my own hand, almost involuntarily, reaching up to brush it away. And I saw our hands on the lantern we had released together, and I remembered, with a lurch of my heart, the feeling that I had been fearing for eighteen years; that our daughter had slipped out of our hands just as easily as that lantern, and as it raised to nothingness in the sky, I, too, dreaded that perhaps, like the lantern, our daughter was gone for good.

I had known my husband well enough, in the many years that we had been ruling our kingdom side by side, to realize that what he needed at the moment was not my pressing curiosity nor my watchful eye, but the companionship that he often found in my silence. And so I returned to my book and left him meandering at the window.

Even now I am unsure of how much time had passed. A few of my pages had been turned, and I had not glanced up at my husband, but I could feel him beside me, and I could sense that not a single muscle in his body had moved since I last looked at him.

And then, in the blink of an eye, the doors to our bedroom had been frantically opened, and we both looked up to see our visitor—one of the guards, it seemed, who had run all the way up to us from his post outside the castle. He did not move, but simply stared at us through his already wide eyes with the most urgent look that I have ever seen on the face of a human being. For a split second, I began to narrow my eyes, somewhat insulted that he found himself in the right to barge in on us as rudely as he did—but then, the split second was over, and as realization dawned upon me, I felt my already large eyes widen too… in disbelief, I think, more than anything…

The guard, seeing the realization spread across us like a wave, gave the smallest of nods, and without thinking, I stood up from my chair, and felt my husband beside me. I must've dropped my book in shock after that, for there was a loud _thunk _at my feet as my husband and I exchanged a bewildered glance.

The next thing I knew, we were running through corridors, down stairwells, and through many, many doors, hearing nothing but our heavy breathing and the clicking of our footsteps, feeling nothing but the pounding of our hearts and the thickness of our lungs, until finally, _finally, _we found ourselves behind the doors that led outside. We froze.

Again, I looked up at my husband, and found him looking down at me with the same exact expression that my face now held, the same exact expression that I had been dreaming of for the past eighteen years.

Eighteen years… Eighteen years had gone by. Eighteen years, and I'd somehow managed to live without her, my only hope being that she was still alive and that she was still out there, somewhere, waiting for me just as I had been waiting for her.

Maybe eighteen years of praying and wishing and hoping had been just enough.

Somehow we knew, we both knew, that this was it… Something inside me suddenly felt heavy as my husband lifted a hand and pushed open the doors.

Standing there at the marble balcony stood a young man, hand in hand with a girl who had short brown hair—a girl who could not, I thought for a single fleeting second, have been my daughter, my golden-haired baby. But in that single fleeting second, the girl turned around, and the heavy thing inside me disappeared just as suddenly as it had come.

I watched as she began to approach me and stopped halfway. But slowly I had managed to lift my own feet from the ground, and the rest of it all came easy. My feet crossed in front of each other as if I wasn't moving them, as if some invisible force from somewhere far beyond here had been moving them for me.

As I approached her, I felt that I was staring into a mirror twenty-five years into the past. Timidly at first, my hand rose to the girl's face—again, it seemed as if I was not the one to make it move—and pressed it against her cheek, holding her there. Her nose was smaller than my own, and her jaw less defined, but the rest of her—those eyes especially, big and green—they all belonged to me. This girl, unmistakably, had to be mine, had to have been my daughter, and as I realized this, I felt my face relax, and my lips curved into a smile, and I watched as hers did the same.

I couldn't help it. I was so overcome by emotion that I had abandoned all things proper and royal and ladylike and I threw my arms around her, held her close to me. And I was sure this time that _I_ had done it, that it was not some invisible force from far away. In this moment, I was not the queen of a thriving kingdom; I was not the wife of a man that I had loved dearly for over twenty years. In this moment, I was nothing but a mother, a mother who had missed her daughter for eighteen years, a mother who would give up all she had, if things ever came to that, just to be a mother. And as I felt her skinny arms wrap themselves ever so tightly around my waist, my heart, heavy as it had been for so long, had lifted, had flown straight up through my chest and into my throat, where it stuck. Tears stung in my eyes. There was no doubt about it—this girl was mine.

I felt her head lift slightly off of my shoulder, and I knew from my husband's chuckle behind me that she had looked into his eyes and that he had seen everything as I had. His big, warm arms wrapped around the two of us, and we all sunk to our knees under his weight. Nothing else mattered to me anymore; I don't think anything else mattered to any of us. We were a family again, just as we had been eighteen years ago. We were a family, as we were always meant to be.

I don't know what possessed me, then, to look up, but when I did, I saw the young man, whom I had forgotten about, standing over us, wearing a happy but longing smile on his charming young face. I recognized him immediately as the wanted thief Flynn Rider, who had stolen our precious crown only days ago. But I had seen the way he looked at my daughter, and it was the same way my husband looked at me, twenty years ago. And I saw the way he was looking at us now, with that sad sort of smile, with that longing in his eyes, and somehow, I understood. Not everything, of course, but I understood everything that I needed to understand about him at that moment. I understood that he loved my daughter, and that he, too, needed a family. And that was enough to make me raise a hand to him, as if in thanks, and instead pull him right into us, right into our family. After all, if he really did love my daughter with everything that he had in his heart, then he was as much a part of us now as she was.

Eighteen years and a day had passed since I'd last seen my child. Eighteen years and a day since I held her in my arms. And here she stands beside me, just as much a part of me now as she was on the day she was born. I see in her hope, a hope beyond my wildest dreams, and I see in her the makings of a true mother-to-be, the desire to give her children all that she never had. I see it in him, too. It shines like the sun all around them, bright as the light in her green eyes, clear as the gleam in his brown ones. In them I see life, youth, love renewed. In them I see hope.

But most of all, in her, I see myself, only more. In her I see the beauty and the sheer love of life that I had foolishly abandoned at her age. I see the bracing acceptance of a curiosity that I could never quite grasp. I see a reckless soul; scarred, no doubt, but with her head held high, ready and willing to accept nearly everything that comes her way, good or bad.

In her, I see my daughter: a daughter that is me. In her I see myself, and all that I never had the power or the strength to become.

She is everything I've dreamed her to be and more. Eighteen years and a day of waiting, and she was well worth every second.


End file.
